Somewhat tangential, though salient to the op…
If someone makes a choice that is not the best choice, can we come to the conclusion that they were ignorant, and thus innocent to this degree??
This gets to the heart of innocence vs. evil.
To bring up something I often do… Everyone knows there is high sexual stratification on the male side, and everyone knows rejection hurts… So are people who don’t say this to get sex as a male innocent or evil???
Carleas, I agree that to an extent, the utility of a given object is relative to the needs and wants of the agent, but no one can argue that a million bucks is worth more than a pile of skittles, hell, even 10 years worth of skittles, because you could buy that with the money and still have money left over.
An argument can be made that even in those cases, allowing the person to choose - unless they will through ignorance choose a mortal option - gives them the greatest possible long term training in decision making. Especally if there are cues that others may know more, which there usually are, about some things. The person choosing could always have sought advice or noted an option they were ignorant about but made a choice anyway. IOW we need not focus on the short term results - did they make the best choice in that situation - when evaluating whether giving them control is best. That test of the idea is very limited. (and one we tend to overuse pedagogically, I think, with children, who at the end of their compulsory education do not know how to learn, but know how to study in a reactive way to the choices of others, those that get this much)
You don’t state it this way: but I want to be clear. It is not binary: addiction here and freedom to choose there. There are gradations of addiction (or whatever broader category you want to use for situations where a person is to some degree compelled ((even to conceive)) to do things a certain way).
If utility is a fundamental factor in choices. I have to say it sounds strange and perhaps not true to me that people have a better knowledge of what will maximize their utility. The utility for them of certain outcomes, that seems less strange a thing to say.
On some occasions two or more heads are better than one. Depending on the problem at hand, one person’s choices and the resulting decision can be made more precise or true when more options are brought into consideration and explored with the assistance of another or others.
However, when it comes to standing on your own in a situation where the knowledge gained from an outside source is seemingly correct yet detrimental in some way, there may be the need to have to overcome the feeling that that source could not possibly be wrong. Sentimentality attached to the advice, counsel or belief of another is hard to let go of. No one can help you develop that courage.
I don’t think it’s necessarily one way or the other. In some circumstances, like the one MrR provided (more on that below), it might be possible to say more or less objectively that someone has not made the best choice. But in others, the choice itself is the only thing that tells us what’s best (e.g. between a pile of red and a pile of green skittles). Then there are intermediate cases, e.g. $1 dollar today or $1.50 a year from now: 50% interest is above what’s normally expected, but some current uses of a dollar may have higher returns for me.
I’d say it’s dangerous to assume that people are ignorant too quickly, because subjective utility is likely to be more pervasive than we realize.
I think that’s right. We could contrive a scenario where skittles are actually worth more than a million bucks, but not without significantly changing what ‘a million bucks’ means. But money is supposed to be a proxy for abstracted utility, and its got choice baked into it: the choice you’ve presented is really between a pile of skittles or a million dollars worth of whatever you want, including skittles.
So this seems to be another nuance I need to make on my grand pronouncement: choice increases utility, unless the choice is between a liquid instrumental good like money and an illiquid intrinsic good like skittles. But maybe this is also solved by my refrain that then the supposed choice is really only adding the practical costs of more options and not meaningfully increasing choice.
I agree with this in practice, but is there anything in theory to prevent this cutting both ways? Why can’t we argue that, as long as the person doesn’t die, they learn whether they’re given something or whether they choose it?
Yes, I agree. Choice is a spectrum, and addiction can put one to the less-choice side of the spectrum to a greater or lesser degree.
And this is a useful visual for several of my lines of argument: utility is increased as we move toward the ‘choice’ end of the spectrum, and sometimes adding more choices (what I’ve been calling options) doesn’t do that.
As Mill points out, it is often the case that the only way to truly know what someone thinks of an outcome is to see whether or not she chooses it. If we give the individual thing B, and then observer he laugh and smile, and thing A makes her weep and pout, and yet when given the choice between them she chooses thing A, it is difficult to say that the thing that most increases her utility is thing B. The other outward manifestations of her subjective impressions don’t seem to trump her actual choice. Do you disagree on that point?
MrR used the superset example, I just used this in a recent thread on what defines intelligence (they can do what you can do, but you can’t do what they can do).
As far as choice and utility are concerned - superset offers more choice and thus more utility.
So… That’s an interesting angle, that more choice means or causes more utility!
Now in saying this, obviously having read the thread, if there is only the most utility offered as a choice, then potentially lack of choice offers the most utility.
BUT this requires maximal superset for all decisions to facilitate ZERO conflicts in the realm of decision theory, because less superset means sub optimal decisions for some and not others, which doesn’t have the most utility.
It wasn’t a separate argument from yours but an extension of it. Yes, they could learn from being given it, but in a system where people are not given choices, as a default, this learning is not so valuable. In a system where they are given the choice as a rule learning matters. But mainly my point was against the use of the short term test as an argument against your position. I think it is will be a facet of most arguments against giving choice as the primary method. And I think those arguments are weak because of what I said previously.
I agree that she may very well be making the right choice for her. And as an aside I have been very grateful for some things that have made me weep. I have developed because of some of these. That said I think my problem is with the idea of increasing her utility. That measure or criterion. It sounds objective. Now she has greater utility. Apart from the hubris involved in quantifying someone’s utility - to whom`? - I mean, when do we stop trying to measure the effects of her utility, in a month, at her death, five hundred years in the future, I think it is an odd way to speak about another person in general. I can see evaluating a person’s utility in relation to specific tasks or roles, but in general it strikes me as rather inhuman.
A dishonest person or scheme can take advantage of you and make you believe that what is being offered is good for you. But you cannot be dishonest with yourself. What is good for you is known only by you. That is what guides you in all situations. Your reason and skill are based on that. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging you don’t know what is ‘good’ unanimously. You’re not going to think there is something wrong with you at the expense of what is claimed to be good.
What really fascinates me concerning utilitarianism is that thing which calls itself the public good or well-being…
Doesn’t have to be the public good. You can just use your own personal good as the goal.
I am talking about its role more specifically under a government model.
Why?
The very root of government tyranny rests upon argumentative stances from utilitarianism concerning generalities of the public good or well-being.
The root of any calculated decision with any goal in mind does too.
Hence my great interest in human nature.
This makes sense to me on a gut level, but in what way can we define choice in a way that’s non-linear with options and also doesn’t beg the question by referring to utility?
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It’s a problem insofar as the irrationality can be seen and understood by some but tends to be the rule for most - otherwise it wouldn’t seem irrational to anybody.
HaHaHa - I don’t have any concise suggestions - a book called The Paradox of Choice by Schwartz, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahnemann are both relevant, and a lot of Nassim Taleb’s work (Antifragile, The Black Swan) looks at heuristics and choice.
Thanks for the suggestions Only Humean.
Moreno, I am perhaps being sloppy with my language when I use ‘utility’. I mean that word to be essentially interchangeable with ‘happiness’, which is how I understand it to be used in the context of utilitarianism. I prefer utility because, as you say, sometimes weeping is better, feels better, than happiness would feel. In any case, I mean it to refer to the subjective values of the individual: increasing a person’s utility means increasing the degree to which their preferences are met (and this perhaps introduces a fatal circularity to my argument: utility is whatever someone would choose, so increasing choice increases utility).
This is a difficult question, so my answer will be hand-wavy and will need to be fleshed out. But my intuition here is that it’s about information: how much information are we getting out of the choice. That’s the role that choice plays in utilitarianism, and Mill recognized that: often the best information we have about what makes someone the happiest is what they choose. So choice is more ‘real’ if it produces more information. A person who doesn’t understand medicine choosing alcohol tells us nothing about their relative value of medicine and alcohol.
I don’t think this answer is circular. Choice is important because it provides information, and information-content is the hallmark of real choice. In a specific instance, we might have trouble determining whether we are actually getting information out of a choice, but we can identify general traits of the kinds of choice that reliably convey information (or at least traits that call the reliability into question, e.g. irrationality, coercion, ignorance).
Then we can see that adding options will tend to decrease information content of a choice, but without reference to utility.
You’re right, and there are cases where one mechanism of choice will tend to produce more irrational decision-making than another mechanism of choice. But I still think this cuts both ways. Sometimes an individual will be irrational in making decisions affecting himself, sometimes a third-party decision-maker will be irrational in making decisions affecting someone else. And I think the decision to deprive someone else of choice is highly susceptible to irrational decision making, so we should take it with a grain of salt.
So to hedge my claim in light of this: the human tendency towards irrationality can mean that, in certain cases, giving an individual the power to decide is not giving them choice in the information-conveying sense of the word.
There is a more general problem with utilitarianism related to this point. Sometimes people will by happy about things that probably shouldn’t make them happy. They’ll discount future happiness more than it seems they should, or they’ll hedonistically focus on physical pleasure in neglect of some ‘higher’ form of happiness. I don’t think utilitarianism is always satisfying on this question. It seems like sometimes it’s tempting to say, “I know you think you’re happy, but that’s an illusion, and you’ll be happier eating broccoli than cake.” Mill claims there’s some hierarchy of happinesses, but that doesn’t seem to be a given, and noble and debased happiness don’t seem to be ordered except by reference to something else, so other principle that isn’t justified by utilitarianism.
I won’t attempt to resolve that. I will say that increasing real choice, as a value separate from utility, will tend to encourage the more noble pleasures, since e.g. learning will improve future choices, while partying won’t. But if choice is just an instrumental good to happiness, then there’s no guaranteeing that the sum of the happiness of learning and the future happiness it brings will be any greater than the sum of the happiness of partying less the future happiness it makes unavailable.
You cannot separate yourself from what you listen to or look at. Preconceptions and expectations are all built into what you think you are listening to or looking at. We normally hear from another only those things which interest us, give us hope, give us something which we can turn into a recipe for living, something which will give us happiness or enlightenment. The mere fact that we even treat an outside source as significant and listen to it with attention and respect, reveals that we are after some kind of transformation which we hope to receive by using what is said.
But there is nothing you can do to change your present condition because whatever you are now, your confusions, problems, conflicts, violence, are all products of thought and self-consciousness. Any attempt on your part to change the given is born out of thought, and whatever thought does only perpetuates and strengthens itself and the knowledge it has, but does not make you free from them.